


Nothing worth having comes without some kind of fight

by bennettmp339



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: (Not A College AU), Captain America Steve Rogers, College Applications, Don’t copy to another site, GED - Freeform, M/M, Male-Female Friendship, Marvel Trumps Hate 2018, More or less Canon Compliant, Not Avengers: Endgame (Movie) Compliant, but completely glosses over Civil War Infinity War and Endgame, job searching, marvel trumps hate, tech-savvy Steve Rogers, websites - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-15
Updated: 2019-03-15
Packaged: 2019-11-18 14:20:28
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,729
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18122087
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bennettmp339/pseuds/bennettmp339
Summary: After the fights with Thanos, Steve Rogers decides to get his GED and go back to school. The GED was easy compared to what came next - job application websites.





	Nothing worth having comes without some kind of fight

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Pineau_noir](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Pineau_noir/gifts).



> Written for Pineau_noir, who donated to Planned Parenthood during the 2018-2019 Marvel Trumps Hate fandom auction. 
> 
> Title is from the song [ "Lovers in a Dangerous Time" by Bruce Cockburn](https://open.spotify.com/track/12P9ERiivVFlWkjhDrQr7d?si=EtIDi6EsTeaAvw0FpTVGFQ).  
> Cockburn, Bruce D. (1984). Lovers in a Dangerous Time. On _Stealing Fire_. [Audio File]. Waterdown, Ontario (Canada): True North Records.

Shortly after everything went down, Thanos was defeated, and things went back to normal for the Avengers, Steve decided that he wanted to go back to school. It felt as if he he had been granted a second chance at life, given a second chance with the love of his life, for the second time, and he didn’t want to lose it, as it felt like he had before. He’d completed high school at the local parish school and taken a few art courses at the local college back in the 30s and 40s when he could afford it, but had no proof of his high school degree. He’d mentioned this to one of Darcy’s friends over lunch one day, that he wanted to go back to school but “nowhere will take me without proof of diploma or this thing called the GED.” She’d given him a half smile around her coffee and promised to look into that for him. After lunch and making plans to meet Darcy for drinks within the week, they headed back to their offices. 

Darcy had explained that, while her friend was the lead assistant to the Science Bros (doing much the same things with Tony and Bruce that Darcy did with Doctors Selvig and Foster), she was a librarian by training and liked the challenge of finding materials long thought lost or destroyed. It was one of the reasons Tony kept her at the position. Others were that she made strong coffee, enjoyed baking for them, got along well with Bruce, and was one of the fastest people Tony knew at accurate data entry. 

Two weeks after Steve mentioned the GED at lunch, she knocked on the door to his office in Avengers Tower and handed him a copy of his birth certificate and his high school diploma. She admitted that his diploma wouldn’t be worth much in 2019, but let him know that she and Darcy were happy to work with him on getting his GED, if he wanted to further pursue his education. She’d explained what a GED was, and had even brought handouts from Kingsborough Community College, Brooklyn College (both part of the City University of New York system and located in Brooklyn), Purchase College (officially called the State University of New York at Purchase and well-known for having varied art programs), and Columbia University (the only New York City Ivy League university) on what he’d need to do to be admitted to various schools. As she left, she handed him a flyer from the University of North Carolina School of the Arts, and told him to think about what he wanted to do with his GED and his collegiate education, if anything. 

Over the next few months, Steve occasionally talked to Darcy and her friend about what he was up to, but he got his GED on his own, with only a little help from Bucky, who decided to get his own education credentials. Unlike Steve, Bucky hadn’t finished his schooling at the local parish school before going to work at the docks, so there was no diploma to find. They both signed up for GED classes, bought several study books, discovered [Free Rice](http://freerice.com/) for vocabulary, math, SAT prep, and general fun. Steve signed up for a GED and SAT question a day on several websites, and signed up for all sorts of test-taking strategies. He was determined to get his GED on the first try. Bucky wanted to, as well, but knew that he wouldn’t be ready by April, which was when Steve wanted to take his GED test. Bucky planned to take his tests in October.

With all of his practicing, it was no surprise that Steve passed the GED tests, all of them, on the first try. He scored high enough that he could apply to almost any of the schools he wanted to apply for. He decided that he wanted to do a Bachelor’s degree instead of an Associate’s, and looked into schools in the area. Darcy and her friend had given him some information about the GI Bill and the Stark Industries Educational Benefits. Stark Industries would cover his bachelor’s at any school, and would pay for 50% of any classes at the Master’s level or above. After some serious consideration, he created a portfolio and applied to several art schools and studio art programs, including the Savannah College of Art and Design, the Pratt Institute, the State University of New York at Purchase, and the University of North Carolina School of the Arts. 

The Pratt Institute had several advantages over the other schools, primarily that he could easily get to it from his apartment in Brooklyn. Steve had never fully moved into the newly christened Avengers Tower after the Battle of Manhattan, and had used his suite in the Tower when needed after the fall of SHIELD and the Battle of Washington, DC. After the fall of SHIELD but before the debacle with the Sokovian Accords, he’d bought a townhouse in Vinegar Hill, Brooklyn. He’d been hoping to have a home to bring Bucky to once he’d found him, and the townhouse became his sanctuary during the fights with Thanos. He worked as an Avenger out of his office in Avengers Tower, but went home to Brooklyn when he could. Bucky had decided against becoming an Avenger, and was looking forward to getting his GED and getting an automotive mechanics licence with his Associate’s Degree. A while back, Stark had insisted that Bucky take a look at a few of his classic cars, and Bucky was greatly enjoying working on them. 

The Pratt Institute conditionally admitted Steve for the Fall 2019 semester. He’d have to take and pass several of the pre-college introductory classes before he would be regularly admitted for the Spring 2020 semester. With his Fall 2019 schedule set, his materials bought, Steve decided it was time to look for a job. 

He wanted something to talk about with his classmates, something that wasn’t Avengers or SHIELD related. Something that was real, something that he could talk about with anyone he met and not worry about non-disclosure agreements and national security. He needed something with flexible hours, and was willing to take very low-pay, since he had all of his Army back pay and Stark Industries paying for his tuition and fees. He found a few job boards, and started seriously looking. Which was when he noticed all of the things that Darcy and her friends had been complaining about. 

The first place he applied for asked him if he was, or had ever been, a member of an organization whose charter says that they want to overthrow the US government. He and Bucky had had a lively yet serious debate about whether the US Communist Party and the local Dockworkers United would be considered organizations who wanted to overthrow the US government. Bucky joked about the Irish Republican Army, and Steve retorted that the IRA was interested in overthrowing the British government and possibly the Irish government, but were not interested in overthrowing the US government. And he’d never been a member. His father may have been a member of the IRB (Irish Republican Brotherhood) and he may have given a few dollars to the fight back in the 30s and 40s (when she’d found that he was interested in continuing his support, Darcy had sat him down and made him learn about what the IRA had done while he was on ice. It was a sobering experience. He’d then immediately asked her to help him learn what had happened since 1945, no longer unconditionally believing what SHIELD had given him for history, which was how he’d met her librarian friend), but he had never been a card-carrying member. He almost clicked yes, since he was a card-carrying member of the Democratic Party and he’d learned that in some places, Democratic voters were almost disenfranchised. Bucky talked him out of it. 

Another job application system showed him all of the supplemental questions on the job description detail page. One of which was where did he go to high school/get his GED, and another was did he have a master’s degree. He doubled-checked the position description, and saw that the position required a master’s degree in the specific field (which was also the terminal degree in the field), so why they wanted to know where he went to high school was beyond him. Bucky found a job posting in California that asked if the applicant was willing to relocate. While it was possible that they were looking for a local applicant, the fact that they thought that they had to ask was a little absurd. He found a posting for a nude life model and was startled in to laughing when he saw that it wanted “4 years of filing experience” and a high school degree. For nude modeling. He was tempted to apply for it, but he was worried about being identified as Captain America and thought that it would be the better part of valor not to apply. 

Then there were the jobs that required him to upload his resume and then add in the specifics of his resume to the system. He’d had some help creating a resume for his GED and college applications, so he was able to use that. According to his sanitized SHIELD file, which Stark Industries had used to create his non-Captain America ID after the fall of SHIELD, he’d served in Afghanistan after dropping out of high school because of his mother’s death and had served three tours on active duty before not re-upping. He’d held the occasional odd job (mopping floors at a museum or two and stocking shelves at a grocers), and some volunteer work at the local public library. All of which was on his resume.

The first time it happened, he’d thought it was a fluke. He’d clicked the button to autofill from his resume, and had seen the note saying that some of his resume hadn’t processed. He’d shrugged, entered in the information that wasn’t on his resume, and then seen the hash that the system had made of his resume, creating random job experiences, and decided that he was just going to input his resume as needed. Then it happened again. And again. System after system, job application after job application, had asked him to upload his resume and then enter the information on his resume into their system. Some even noted that putting “see resume/CV” into any section of his job experience had the potential to disqualify his application. 

Then there were the systems that made him manually enter information off of a list that he couldn’t see. He would enter in his “start date” (the one given to him by SHIELD and Stark Industries) and click into the “end date” box and his cursor would jump back to the “start date” box. The same thing would happen as he tried to add the job company, the job title, and the job location. Some of the boxes would make him add the name of the place he worked, based on a three to five number code that he had to look up in their system. Not all of them were in the system, including both large government organizations and several universities. He’d gotten curious and started looking for places he knew his friends had worked. Darcy’s Culver University wasn’t available as a job location, nor was the Peace Corps. He got pretty good at searching for job titles, job locations, and city codes from that system. 

One system required him to create a new username for each of his applications. He could use the same email address, but he had to create a new user account for every application. It seemed unnecessarily complicated for the human resources people who had to deal with it.

Occasionally, he’d find a system that he didn’t think he’d created an account in but he had one, and he had to go through the rigamarole to request his username and reset his password. He was sure he hadn’t applied for a job at that company - he was keeping a list of where he was applying and his usernames and passwords - but the system was insisting that he had an account.

Then there were the personality quizzes. He’d heard about them, seeing screenshots online, but hadn’t quite believe that they were real, and really were part of applying for jobs. He had to answer questions about his faith in humanity and what he would do if he knew a fellow employee was stealing from the company. When talking with Bucky, he decided that those personality quizzes were designed to weed out people who have a disability, but didn’t want to disclose it, and were probably a form of hiring discrimination. He wasn’t sure how or why they were required for part-time work stocking shelves and mopping floors, but they were required. 

A couple of systems were decent, in that the same system was used by multiple companies and it remembered his information from previous applications. Those were the easy ones, as all he had to do was double check his information and make sure that his most recent resume was uploaded, along with his company-specific cover letter. 

Some of the places he applied at required him to fill out various “voluntary EEO” forms, which he learned were to help prevent discrimination within the hiring process and within the company. While the forms allowed him to check that he didn’t want to release that information, he knew that not giving them that information could be used against him. Some places gave him multiple options for gender (Darcy insisted that that was a way to discriminate against trans people, since the only option available was usually ‘other’ and you really aren’t supposed to ask for LGBT status), and other were just ‘male’ and ‘female.’ He wasn’t sure if selecting one’s ethnicity and race was more or less likely to get them an interview or a job, nor was he sure about the protected veteran (he did click that he was a protected veteran) or the disability status (he disclosed that he once had various disabilities). 

It was disheartening, the job application systems, as it made him feel as if he was shouting out into the void and hoping for an answer. He usually got auto response emails from the companies, confirming that his application had been accepted, but not always. It was rare that he even heard back from the applications, and he was still getting rejection letters when he started his first official classes in the Spring 2020 semester. He could only imagine what it was like for someone who was actively looking for a job in a specific field, since he was only getting the smallest of tastes of the job-search world. 

But, eventually, despite all of his feelings of yelling into the void, Steve received a job offer. He’d had a short interview with the museum - he was applying as a Day Porter (a job he remembered from before the ice but most people called ‘janitor’) and was available to potentially do security work if needed during events - and they called him to offer him the position. He could start once the human resources paperwork and background check went through. While not the most glamorous of work, it gave him something tangible to do when he wasn’t in class or working as an Avenger. It didn’t take that long before they were asking if he wanted to transition to be a docent, work on curating the collections and looking for up-and-coming local artists, or a museum educator. While all of those jobs required more training and more school (the lowest-level museum education and curation jobs led to positions that required both a _Master’s Degree_ and certification from the Society of American Archivists), it was something he liked doing more than mopping floors and acting as event security. All of the issues he had with the job application websites seemed to be worth it, as they paid off with his advancing career at this museum. Now, to discover if they’d figured out that he was Captain America, and not just someone who looked like him and shared his famous name….


End file.
